Saturday, 28 January 2017

Dates: Conference 10th-12 April Abstracts by Monday 2oth March Papers by Friday 31stMarch

From 1995 to 2016, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'.

We're very happy to announce that the Twenty Second AF&PP Conference will be held between Monday 10th and Wednesday 12th April 2017.

The Conference rubric will remain as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate.

Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 60 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics, history and geography. The Manchester conferences have been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes. Papers should address such matters as:

* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests

* social movement theory

* utopias and experiments

* ideologies of collective action

* etc.

To offer a paper, please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:

Friday, 27 January 2017

London was the destination for communists and anarchists to
meet and argue over the form that the coming revolution would take.
German anarchists had lived in London since 1848 and came to police
attention after assassination attempts on the Tsar of Russia. Lenin knew
London well, and the final split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
took place here in November 1903, with tragic consequences for the
Russian Revolution in 1917. The communists had fled police spies in
Brussels to meet in Charlotte St in the guise of an anglers club.

Successive waves of exiles from France, Germany and Russia made
a home in Fitzrovia, close to the British Museum where Marx and Lenin
studied, yet in an area where foreigners ran the bookstores and shops.
On this walk we will find the streets where the leading Communard Louise
Michel lived and established a pioneering Fitrovia school, and revisit
the site of the Autonomie anarchist club, linked by police to the
Greenwich bomb of 1894 which inspired Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.

Paul Le Blanc is Professor of History at La Roche College (USA) and
author of works on the labour and socialist movements, including Lenin and
the Revolutionary Party, From Marx to Gramsci, and Leon Trotsky.
An editor of the eight-volume International Encyclopaedia of Revolution and
Protest, he is currently helping to oversee the Verso Books edition of The
Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

​---------------------------------------------​

October
1917 – workers in power
Published by Merlin Press, Resistance Books

‘This collection, containing both texts by participants and retrospective
historical analyses, defends the achievements of the Revolution while honestly
recognizing its limitations, and will stimulate informed discussion.’Ian Birchall, socialist historian.

‘This is an important collection celebrating the legacy of the Russian
Revolution in its centenary year. Paul Le Blanc’s Introduction provides
rich historical context for past events. But the book is really about the
future.‘Tithi Bhattacharya, Professor of History, Purdue University; editorial
board member, International Socialist Review.

‘A fascinating and unexpected collection of material that shines a needed light
on the workers revolution of 1917. All in all, a spirited defence of the
October revolution at a time when many people would like to forget all about
it.’Lars Lih, author of Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in
Context, Haymarket 2008.

I
want to make a few history-related points on the book here. I was indeed there.
I was at the battles of Wood Green and Lewisham, at the Carnivals and on the
streets. I still have a pair of steel toe capped Doc Martens and they weren’t
(mostly) used for industrial purposes. They were, and the book captures this
well, different times.

In
the late 1970s I did not walk down any street without scrutinising those also
walking to see if they might be fascists who were about to attack me. I don’t
do that now because the current strength of organised fascism is low. Indeed I
moved to my current address in central
Tottenham precisely because it is so difficult to find. Not that difficult
though because the front window still has a bullet hole in it, which I’ve left
as a memoir of different times. I wasn’t in when the bullet was fired, but the
windows are double glazed as a precaution anyway. The times are not so
different though. Racism still needs to be fought, big time in the age of
Farage and Trump. Whether music will be as central remains to be seen perhaps.

Anyway,
the book is essentially an oral history covering Rock Against Racism and the
Anti-Nazi League, Two Tone and Red Wedge. The author has assembled quotes from
a extensive range of people under subject headings in more or less
chronological order.

I’d confess as a professional historian to not being that
enthusiastic about oral history because memory is unreliable and quite
difficult to check. Iwouldn’t bet on every last statement in the
book being accurate but that isn’t really the point. Instead it gives a real
flavour of how culture, music and the left came together to fight fascism,
racism and the right and some idea both of the breadth of the support needed to
do this and the importance of having some coherent political organisation at
its core, whether this was the SWP or the Labour Party or both.

Of
course Red Wedge was not Rock Against Racism and the distinct parts of the book
perhaps don’t have such an automatic follow on. Nor is there an attempt,
understandably it being an oral history, to grapple with what precise longer
term impact something like RAR had.

Since
I was there and know a lot of the people interviewed well the book does read to
me like all my yesterdays. But allowing old socialists to recall the past is
hopefully not what it is meant to be about. It should be read by those who were
NOT there both to get some sense of how movements were built and what is
possible, and hopefully to inspire activity and organisation now.

You
can always criticise and hopefully there is a positive purpose to that but
beyond that this is a book you should read whether you were there and
particularly if you were not.

It is twenty years since
the death of one of the most significant socialist historians of the post-1945
era, Raphael Samuel. In the age of post-truth particularly his work, focused as
it was on the recovery of working class and plebeian history and dominated by
the rigour of the carefully researched footnote deserves to be not just
remembered but taken as an exemplar.

Below is an obituary that
appeared in Socialist Review January 1997 by Keith Flett

Obituary: Artisan
of history

Raphael
Samuel (26 Dec 1934- 9 Dec 1996)

Keith Flett

Raphael
Samuel, who has died aged 61, was a youthful member of the Communist Party
Historians’ Group in the 1950s when its leading members included Eric Hobsbawm
and E. P. Thompson. However, he left the CP in 1956 and as a socialist
historian he was very much a child of the `new left’ and the upheavals of the
1960s.

Samuel studied under Christopher Hill at BalliolCollege,
Oxford, in the
early 1950s, but, unlike the older generation of Marxist historians, Samuel
never sought academic advancement. His published work, usually under the banner
of the History Workshop, was invariably a collaborative exercise, and for more
than 30 years from 1962 he remained a tutor at RuskinCollege, Oxford, encouraging mature trade union
students to take an interest in historical research.

History Workshop collections edited by Samuel, such as Village Life and Labour and Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, opened up a focus on the
history of ordinary working people, and the essays were usually written by
`worker historians’ ­ often students of Samuel at Ruskin.

So thirteen History Workshop pamphlets including Stan
Shipley’s Club Life and Socialism in
mid-Victorian London
were published between 1970 and 1974. Shipley had been an AEU branch secretary in Walthamstow.

Perhaps ironically, shortly before his death Samuel was
persuaded to take a long overdue and much deserved professorship at a new
centre for the study of community in the East End of London at the University of East London.

Samuel was a key figure behind the rise of the History
Workshop movement which began life at RuskinCollege, Oxford,
in 1966 as an informal seminar on the English countryside in the 19th century.
The principal, Samuel has related, almost closed it down, worried that students
were listening to each other rather than to the lecturers. History Workshop
Journal followed in 1975.

The Workshops in particular brought together large numbers
of rank and file socialist historians committed to recovering the past from the
viewpoint of ordinary people. Early sessions famously included topics such as
`A Day With the Chartists’ which sought to recreate the ideas, experiences and
conditions that the Chartists had encountered.

The Workshop in particular became very much a product, as
Samuel recorded in People’s History and Socialist Theory [1981], of the events
and enthusiasms of 1968. Ruskin was out on strike days before the Paris events of May 1968.

Raphael Samuel was one of the most prominent historians in
the country to support history from below ­ the attempt to actively recover the
history of ordinary people and their movements. In many ways this was a step
forward from the sometimes rather rigid orthodoxies of more mechanical Marxist
histories. It fed in directly, too, to the resurgence of socialist ideas after
1968 and to the birth of the women’s movement in which the History Workshop
Conference of November 1968 played a central organising role.

Samuel could be fiercely critical of socialists with whom
he disagreed. Debate has raged, for example, about whether a series of articles
he wrote about the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s in New Left Review
under the title `The Lost World of British Communism’ was an attempt to write
an affectionate history from below of what it had been like to be a CP member
before 1956 or an attack on any kind of left wing political activism.

He was nevertheless a great enthusiast for history and a
great encourager of people engaged in socialist historical research. His energy
and productivity knew no bounds, whether it was in organising meetings or
producing articles.

With his untimely death socialists can make a preliminary
attempt to draw a balance sheet of what Raphael achieved. The History Workshop
movement, of which Samuel published a 25 year history in 1991, has declined and
become, to an extent, sucked into academic respectability.

In recent years it has dropped its masthead describing it
as a journal of `socialist and feminist historians’ as it has reflected the
pessimism of some on the left about the prospects for change after the collapse
of Stalinism. Certainly the early, welcome, focus on working class history and
movements and direct links to political activity in the present have largely
gone.

Gone too is the commitment to
`worker historians’. In its place has come a certain attraction to the ideas of
postmodernism. Both the History Workshop ­ where it still functions ­ and History Workshop Journal, however,
remain battlegrounds, in historical terms, for many of the ideas, goodand bad, which are current on the left.

Their influence, and that of Samuel, has been immense.
Groups and publications inspired bythem exist in many countries.

History from below as practised by Samuel and others has
also met its limitations. In many cases it has led towards an interest in
ephemera and detailed micro-

histories which, while of interest to the historian, are
certainly not about changing the world. Samuel himself in recent years became
increasingly interested, as his 1994 collection of articles Theatres of Memory indicates, in
recovering the popular history of culture, cultural objects and artefacts.
Samuel saw this interest in heritage as a real living people’s history,
genuinely democratic and open to all. It is as a people’s historian rather than
as a socialist historian that he would probably wish to be remembered.

Even so socialist history in this country would have been
and will be much the poorer without Raphael. He kept his commitment and his
ability to argue to the end. I came across him at the Bishopsgate Institute,
opposite Liverpool Street station, which
was to be the centre of his new chair, weeks before his death.

Despite being terribly ill he found time not only to
enquire into my own research but to have a spirited debate about whether
Charles Bradlaugh’s National Secular Society, formed in 1866, was a
proto-Labour Party. That was Raphael, argumentative and passionate about his
history to the end. He was ­ and remained ­ a real product of the 1960s with
all the good and bad points that flow from that.

Republished in London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 60 (Spring 2017).

Particularly
since Donald Trump won the US
Presidential Election there has been much discussion of ‘post-truth’ and a
related issue, ‘fake news’, the latter being focused on the social media site
Facebook. The general idea is that Trump and his associates said what they felt
like and what they thought would play well to without the slightest regard to
whether or not it was true or had any relationship to reality.

The same approach was apparent during the UK Brexit referendum campaign, from the side of
the political right. Michael Gove denigrated the value of ‘experts’, that is
people who actually know something as opposed to those who just have an opinion
or make it up. More recently hard right Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has told BBC Newsnight that experts are in the same
category as soothsayers. One reaction to this is to revisit the regulation of
the media proposed by the Leveson Report. But the post-truth world of stories,
myths and lies goes far deeper and wider than that. One way, from the left,
that an effective challenge can be built to post-truthers, is through
historical research and publication.

Of
course academia has plenty of both but that is hardly going to reach to many of
those who are inclined to go along with reactionary ideas. This year sees the
40th anniversary of the first publication of History Workshop Journal, which at the recently published issue 82,
leading with new research on the Tolpuddle Martyrs, is still going strong. It
is also the 20th anniversary in December of the untimely death of Raphael
Samuel, a key founding figure behind the History Workshops held at RuskinCollege
in Oxford and the Journal as
well. The first History Workshop day event held at Ruskin in March 1967 was
called a ‘Day with the Chartists’. It heard from socialist academics like
Dorothy Thompson who were researching the subject but the emphasis was on what
the participants could discover themselves. The idea in this case was to look
at what the Chartists had been doing in their own local areas, to check
original sources of evidence, for example in local record offices, and to
understand from their own experience what the Chartist challenge to capital had
been in the 1840s.

The Journal when it was launched placed a
similar emphasis on grassroots research. There were reports about labour
history to be found in archives and perhaps most of all a fascination with what
working people had done politically in previous times and how. Samuel himself
was invariably immersed in the details of the history of the lives of workers.
His classic study of Victorian industry and labour, Workshop of the World,
available free online, is notable for its large number of footnotes.

The
Workshop and Journal spawned a series
of pamphlets which were and remain classic studies of the detail of aspects of
working class history. For example Stan Shipley’s Club Life and Socialism in
mid-Victorian London uncovered the history of working men’s clubs, particularly
in areas like Homerton, and how their activities formed part of the basis of
the socialist movement’s development after the demise of Chartism in the 1860s. History Workshop Journal is now arguably
a little more academic in style and the link to worker historians is gone.
However it helped to inspire a network of left-wing history groups across the
UK that carry on the tradition of researching and remembering the realities of
working class life and politics. In the age of post-truth remembering reality
is important.

I want to briefly consider
some comparisons between the refugees from Nazism in the 1930s with today’s
refugees. First I want to touch on Government policy towards refugees in the
1930s and now. Although the British state welcomed neither the refugees from
Nazism nor today’s refugees, the National Government under Baldwin, not a
Government known for its liberal policies, admitted 10,000 children from the
Kindertransport in a matter of months and somewhere between 40,000 -70,000
refugees altogether, many of whom arrived in the 12 months before the outbreak
of war. The Home Secretary, Hoare, actually agreed to provide group, not
individual, visas for the Kindertransports, which one can only wish had also
been Government policy for the children in the Jungle. Of course, the numbers
saved were not nearly enough.

Kindertransport memorial - Liverpool Street Station

The popular construction of
the Kindertransport is now used to divert attention from how few the National
Government accepted: about 1 in 10 of would-be refugees. The Kindertransport
also provides this Government with ideological cover: while it only admits 500
children from the Jungle, it exhorts us about how the Kindertransport reveals
how generous Britain
has been towards refugees. Yet less than 4000 Syrian adult refugees have so far
been accepted out of the meagre 20,000 over five years promised. Almost
indistinguishable from UKIP, the Government justifies its failure to open its
doors by arguing that unlike the 1930s, the refugees can go somewhere else.

There are some similarities, for example the
hostility by some towards refugees then and now. The Jews were going to take
your jobs, as will today the refugees or European migrants. And though refugees
from Nazism were not accused of being potential terrorists, the fact that tens
of thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis
were interned in the Isle of Man and elsewhere
in 1940 reveals how far they were seen as a potential fifth column. (By the
way, if you were suspected of being a communist, your fate was likely to

be being shipped to Canada or Australia.) Today, refugees are
presented as potentially posing a threat to national security, more so in France or the US, but also here. The terms of
‘Jews’ or ‘Muslims’ are also both ideological constructions, creating a racist
stereotype as well as turning the refugee into the ‘other’.

But I want to suggest a couple
of differences. The dominant discourse, since the 1970s, has been
multi-culturalism. Partly thanks to the organised opposition to racists from
the 1970s onwards in the UK,
it is generally safe for refugees and migrants (often indistinguishable despite
what the Government tells us) to appear dressed in ways with which they are
culturally comfortable.

Refugees often speak to their
children in their original language: their second-generation child becomes
bilingual. Schools recognise Eid. On the other hand, the refugees from Nazism
were encouraged to assimilate but that
was also what they generally wanted for themselves and their children.

Another difference is that the
earlier refugees generally wanted to settle here. There was generally nothing
for them to go back to. But refugees today talk about wanting to go back home.
Although I don’t want to underestimate the barbarism of the war in Syria, the devastation of Libya or the civil war in Somalia, no
state organised ethnic cleansing of the same magnitude is taking place as under
the Nazis. At least some members of the refugees’ families will probably
survive. With luck, there will be a
‘home’ to go back to.

So the sense of dislocation by the children of the
refugees may be experienced differently. It is as yet unclear how far the
children of refugees from Nazism’s sense of feeling both ‘outsiders’ in the
country where they were born and little connection to the country where their
parents were born is particular to them. The more family members survive, the
greater the possibility of the reconstitution of a family, something evidently
unlikely when the family were almost all murdered. My father, I was to discover,
made real efforts to find who in his family – and amongst his comrades-had
survived the war. He did find a few relatives but the closest was in Italy, the furthest in Brazil. He had
never known any of them before he had fled and his attempts to rebuild a
network- or reconstitute a family - through letters largely petered out. Modern
technology: the email, Skype and Twitter can diminish the effect of
geographical dislocation and make maintaining contact easier for the modern
refugee. One hopes that the modern refugee family do not maintain the silence
and emotional barriers towards their children that characterise so many
families of Nazi refugees.

We are witnessing a shift in the dominant discourse
towards refugees. Racist influence is increasing. As in the 1930s, the hysteria
of the Daily Mail and other media outlets and the increasing UKIP-lite talk of
the Government towards the refugees is legitimating a hostility towards
refugees and migrants more generally. Though one has to suspect public opinion polls,
it seems only just over a half of people polled supported allowing in children
from the jungle. In a period of
increasing economic insecurity and inequality, we need to oppose whenever and
however possible all forms of racism.